Month: January 2013

The real Jesus had dirt underneath his fingernails and calluses on his hands. He probably smelled badly from sweating profusely in the Judean sun on his long hikes to Jerusalem, and Jesus was, without a doubt, rumored to be a hypocrite or absolutely mad for all the time he spent with prostitutes and those afflicted with leprosy.

With the new app, those who want to submit a tip can also send in a picture. That’s nothing new. Police have received scores of pictures among the 2,100 text tips it has received to 274637 (crimes). The quality of the tips and pictures vary, depending on the smartphone used to take them, but the NYPD says it solved a rape thanks to a text message.

We are living on the horizon of a bright tomorrow. Transparency, efficiency, and participation are echoing through the halls of government and in the streets of New York. In 2009, when a small group of organizers and technologists walked through the doors of the State House, we etched these words into the walls. Four years later, transparency, efficiency, and participation have been etched across the world as the mantra of public / private collaboration.

In my childhood, service and adventure filled my dreams. Both sides of my Grandparents dedicated their lives to their families and community. My maternal grandparents were educators. My paternal grandfather was a warrior & my paternal grandmother was a caretaker. I grew up the son of two US Air Force officers. They intermingled their stories with optimism and adventure. Their inspiration and support gave me the fertile grounds to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout and dedicate my High School career to community service.

After several years attempting to make a buck in the roaring 1990s, I found myself under 25, and unemployed for the second time. In 2003, I saw our nation slip into two wars and further into a an unsustainable economy. It was then that I said enough was enough, and I volunteered for John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. On 1 Aug 2004, I moved to NYC and vowed to make a better city. In my NYC first year, I discovered a budding vine of code named Drupal. This vine, was fresh, global, idealistic, and fertilized with civic roots. It wrapped every one of my digital ideals into one easily deployed software package.

In 2013, we will root our civic technology community in sustainable soil. For in 2014, a new municipal administration will take over the Mayor’s Office, the Council’s Speaker’s chair, the Public Advocate’s gavel, and the Comptroller’s calculator. For our city to bridge into the next administration, we must have strong roots.

Luckily, New York City’s civic technology & open government community does not grow alone. Thanks to a lattice of experienced brothers and sisters, New York State and City is blessed with a suite of forward thinking transparency and open government laws, statutes, policies, and programs.

Our next 12 months are an unprecedented opportunity to innovate. Over the next 12 months, we must actively engage NYC’s administration, and maximize our opportunity with one of the most creative municipal governments this Nation has ever seen.

Together, we will explore the City’s data sets and generate new insights.Together, we will build efficient ways for us to report our issues to the City.Together, we will engage in mutual aid and never forget that through unity we are the strongest.

If you are ready to stand with the hundreds of fellow New Yorkers who have already committed to coding for New York, I ask you to make a resolution and join us…

1. Join Open NY Forum, this forum will be used for CfA Brigade related announcements.2. Schedule a meeting with me and discuss your civic technology issues, problems, or opportunities via oHours.3. Or contact me at Noel@CodeForAmerica.org or @noneck on twitter.

there is a conflicting process at work; as North Brooklyn is planned now, over the next decade, the actual amount of mixed-use commercial space will dramatically decrease. As the demand for above street level non-retail commercial space goes up, new development in our area will be predominantly residential without any mixed-use space for the new creative economy. And instead of continuing to develop as a vibrant cultural and economic engine, the new North Brooklyn will effectively become an inner ring suburb [and be economically consumptive rather than generative].

The film has strange insights into the future. If you look at the people running around looking at their little monitors in front of them all the time, that’s what you see in the streets today everywhere – that sort of addiction to the computer image. You’ll find that in many young people today. It’s a real disease. And the main technology in the film – to make a blind person see, or to extract images from the brain of a person – that’s what scientists do. It’s the very same technology today, in 2011. I’ve had several scientific reports of the first images drawn out of a person’s brain, strictly represented by brainwaves. And they gave imagery that looked exactly like what we’d done in the film. So it’s funny how science fiction eventually becomes reality.